虚拟经济条件下的资本市场与宏观经济分析

随着20世纪后期以来经济虚拟化进程的加速，需要一种新的宏观分析方法，能够将资本市场理和宏观经济理论更好地结合起来。本文在这方面作了一些尝试。试图将资本市场作为经济中内生的一部分，与居民、企业和银行等经济中其他部门联系起来，从而更好的分析和解释宏观经济波动。     

Electoral Balancing in Federal and Sub-national Elections: The Case of Canada

The major premise of this study is that in federal countries voters can balance and moderate national policy by dividing electoral support between different parties in federal and sub-national elections. We compare the non-concurrent federal and provincial elections in Canada to assess the balancing properties of sub-national elections. The balancing hypothesis implies that the federal incumbent party may suffer additional electoral losses in provincial elections. We use several statistical tests - ordinary OLS, fixed effect and unbalanced random effect cross-section time series - to analyze Canadian electoral data for the period of 1949-1997. All tests sustain that the incumbent party at the federal level loses votes in provincial elections.     

International Markets and Open Economy Macroeconomics: a Keynesian view

This paper attempts to sketch a Keynesian response to the gap between the reality of international capital markets and the ‘standard paradigm’ of economic theory that underpins the policy model offered to poor countries in relation to their participation in the world economy and their national macroeconomic management. Recent work on imperfect markets, much of it from self-styled ‘New Keynesian’ point of view, implies a substantial modification of this standard paradigm to allow for non-price clearing but this does not appear to to have been integrated with new trade theories, while the implications of systemic volatility and credit rationing behaviour have not been theorized. The paper suggests that a return to Keynes's original approach to investor uncertainty and global demand might not only help to integrate international macroeconomic theory in a plausible manner but also contribute to the foumulation of more desirable policy positions.     

The household preference structure and pricing-to-market in the New Open Economy Macroeconomics models

In this paper, I study three New Open Economy Macroeconomics models to investigate how the assumptions made about the household preference structure and the degree of pricing-to-market affect the model solutions. The first model is a generalized two-country, two-sector model which produces the theoretical ambiguity concerning the state of the economy. The second model simplifies the preference structure and generates the tractable model solutions. The third pricing-to-market model finds that the terms of trade movements depend crucially on the degree of pricing-to-market. The empirical investigation is thus of much interest since theory fails to give a clear prediction.     

Australia and the Pacific Economy*

The industrialization and growth of East Asian countries has shifted the centre of world trade and economic activity towards the Pacific. There has already been a huge redirection of Australia's trade and external economic interests towards the region, based importantly on the emergence of Japan as a major economic power. Australia's future economic prospects will be significantly determined by how it manages its trade policy interests in the context of continuing East Asian industrialization. The most promising Australian trade policy approach is one which allies Australia's trading interests to those of East Asian countries in seeking to maintain an open non-discriminatory trade regime, supportive of the transformation of trade specialization necessary to the industrialization of resource-deficient countries, and which marries that objective to the liberalization of her own and Pacific country markets.     

Estimates of the Underground Economy in Australia

In an age of tighter government regulation, many individuals and businesses are distorting our notion of the size of the Australian economy by actively participating in the underground economy. The consequences are clear: policy makers have imperfect knowledge on the state of economic affairs. Although there exists considerable international literature on the size of the underground economy, academics and public officials alike appear to have paid little attention to the extent of illicit economic behaviour in Australia. The aim of this paper is to provide the first known time-series estimate of the size of the Australian underground economy and to illustrate that its existence has implications for the nature of the business cycle in Australia.     

Open-Economy Macroeconomics: Developments in Theory and Policy

This paper views developments in open-economy macroeconomics through the lens of the debate over European monetary unification. The empirical tendency for nominal exchange rate regimes to affect the variability of nominal and real exchange rates alike can be rationalized by sticky-price theories or models of asset-market liquidity effects. But plausible liquidity models have difficulty generating enough persistence to match the data. Thus, the macroeconomic stabilization costs of forgoing the exchange-rate realignment option seem pertinent. It is argued that our theories of efficiencies due to a common currency remain unsatisfactory, despite recent advances. The paper concludes by reviewing theories of currency crisis     

Intertemporal Solvency in the Small Open Economy of Australia

This paper employs cointegration and multicointegration analysis to explore the issue of external solvency in the small open economy of Australia. Results indicate that in the fixed exchangerate era exports and imports are multicointegrated while in the more recent floating exchange-rate period the series do not share a conventional long-run equilibrium relationship. The results are consistent with intertemporal external solvency in the early period and insolvency more recently. Sustainability criteria are reviewed. Indications are that low saving and investment rates may inhibit Australia's abiliry to sustain persistent external imbalances, however, recent fiscal adjustments may work to abate this problem.     

Business Cycle Properties of the Legitimate and Underground Economy in Australia

The business cycle characteristics of the legitimate economy have been examined quite extensively. In this paper we extend the standard business cycle analysis to the underground economy and compare it to the legitimate economy. Using National Bureau of Economic Research dating methodologies we find that classical cycles exhibit strong incidence of asymmetry while growth cycles appear relatively symmetric. We find that changes in legitimate activity lead to changes in underground activity but that the underground economy responds more to negative shocks in legitimate activity than to positive shocks. This implies that the underground economy is deepening economic downturns and increasing the volatility of the business cycle in general.     

Understanding the Transaction Costs of Transition: it's the Culture,Stupid

The process of transition in Central and Eastern Europe from socialism to capitalism is a cultural issue rather than a mere technical one. To support this proposition, economic analysis must explain why and how informal rules affect the results of transition.     

Federal and Foreign Trade Deficits and the Future of the U.S. Economy

The author traces the course of the economy during the past few years, raising questions about its future course. Unless drastic (and seemingly unlikely) actions are taken, Due predicts the resumption of inflation, a depression, or both.     

The Siting of Hazardous Waste Facilities in Federal Systems: The Political Economy of NIMBY

This paper offers a new political economy explanation for thepervasive problem of siting hazardous waste treatment facilitiesin federal system. We first show that a decentralized systemyields the first-best waste treatment capacity level and that acentralized structure gives rise to free-riding behavior amonglocal jurisdictions. In our model, each community seeks toinfluence the central government through political contributions.This leads to suboptimal levels of treatment capacity. Thecapacity is increasing in the compensation level if the marginalbenefit of treatment capacity is sufficiently large, and in thegovernment's weight on aggregate social welfare relative tolobbying activities. The centralized system can replicate thedecentralized system with a sufficiently high compensation level.Since compensation has proved difficult, a centralized systemfaces greater obstacles than a decentralized system.     

Enhancing the Macroeconomics Course: An Experiential Learning Approach

Although the history of the development of reliable testing instruments for economics goes back only a few years, the Test of Economic Understanding (TEU, 1963) and the Test of Understanding of College Economics (TUCE, 1967-1968) have already resulted in valuable measurements of student learning. Villard's critical appraisal of these tests, and of research based upon their use, summarizes where we now stand in the evaluation of teaching effectiveness.